You are reading: Top tips for successful content curation on social media

As a digital marketer, you’ve probably spent countless hours, days, and or even years building a presence across multiple social media channels. Now that you’ve gained a following on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, or whatever platforms you have decided to use, you need to work out how you are going to keep them engaged with your brand. Simply tweeting about how amazing your brand or products are isn’t going to interest your audience for too long, you need to start sharing additional content that will appeal to your followers. Producing a constant feed to interesting, relevant, and quality content can be an extremely difficult task. This is where content curation comes into play.

What is content curation?

Content curation involves filtering through all the content available in your industry and sharing the most interesting and relevant pieces across your social channels. It’s all about finding fantastic pieces of relevant content and sharing this with your audience.

Why is content curation important?

Sharing external news and stories relating to your industry or niche, from experts around the world, is an excellent way to keep your social media following engaged. Additionally, when managing various social media channels it is key to ensure you don’t get caught in the trap of only sharing content that relates to your brand or products. Your followers will quickly become bored of reading a constant stream of self-indulgent, promotional posts, therefore you need to take the time to find out what your audience wants to read. Once you have done that, you can start sharing relevant content that will help develop and expand your online presence.

3 Top tips for content curation

1. Keep it relevant

This is closely related to finding out what it is your followers want to read about. Once again you cannot simply share content that will benefit your brand or is closely linked to your brand. The key is to add to the conversation and share information that your audience will find interesting and useful.

So how do you find out what your audience wants? You have to listen to them – having an active blog where your readers can comment their opinions, questions, or suggestions will help give you an idea of what type of content they are after. Alternatively, using monitoring tools such as Google alerts will help to give you an indication of the types of questions your readers are searching for.

2. Strategy is key

While searching the web for the best content to share, it is important to ensure you have a strategy in place. With a nearly endless amount of content available, having a strategy in place will help to reduce the amount of time wasted searching for content. Making the most of tools such as Buzzsumo will help simplify the entire process as this tool finds the most shared content for whatever it is you’re searching for. If you want a more detailed overview of some of the best features of Buzzsumo, you can read more here.

3. Remember the importance of content creation

Although it is important to share curated content, it is still important to spend the time to create your own content. You must ensure there is a balance between the amount of curated content and the amount of unique content you post. Constantly sharing external opinions and not weighing in with your own thoughts will reduce your authority as you are not sharing your own knowledge or joining in with the discussion. It is important to voice your own opinion when sharing content from others to show you aren’t getting lazy and just sharing it for the sake of it. This could be as simple as saying the piece was interesting or asking for your readers to give their opinions.

A study by researchers at Microsoft and Columbia University found that over half of the URLs shared on Twitter have never been clicked on. This statistic shows that readers are more interested in specific content that fits their needs, not content that has just been shared for the sake of it – although this isn’t too surprising. However, this does show the importance of creating relevant content that your audience is interested in and want to read.

It’s time to start curating content

Content curation should be a vital part of any social media campaign. Once the creative juices slow down it can be extremely hard to keep producing and sharing interesting and relevant content that will keep your followers interested. Sharing relevant and up to date content will not only display your knowledge and interest in your industry but it will also help to maintain your status as an industry expert.